I can’t really stick with 17.04 indefinitely, so I decided to explore
installing Debian instead. I grabbed the latest Debian Stable ISO and
stuck it on my USB stick. Right off the top,
the Debian installer noticed that I’d
used UNetbootin to make the USB stick and
warned me off
using it.

Huh.

So I went back and put the Ubuntu ISO on the stick with a straight up
dd. And it all installed without a hitch.
I got everything spun up and it all seemed to work just fine…except for
the usual laptop issues with display drivers. Sigh.

The Nouveau drivers don’t seem to handle
multiple external monitors very well. The Nvidia drivers come
in about 87 flavors. The “384” flavor works fine on 17.04, but on
18.04, that’s just a transitory package that installs “390”. Going to the
graphics-drivers PPA gets me “396”. Neither of those recover from
suspend correctly. They both produce a weird patina of static:

Fuzzy screen

I did a little poking around on the web, but didn’t find any obvious
way to get the “384” drivers for 18.04.
I suppose I could ignore the bug (it can be “fixed” by updating the
background), but having a display driver mess up the display
doesn’t instill confidence.

I could give up on one of the external monitors and go with the Nouveau
drivers, I guess. But ☹.

I could throw in the towel and replace the laptop; it’s a somewhat
aging ThinkPad and it will need to be replaced “soon”. I’d be
tempted to get a MacBook Pro, except that the current models all seem
to suck. (I have no interest in Touch-Id. The Touchbar seems to be
pretty universally regarded as a mistake. And I’m very leary of a
laptop with keyboard issues. I’ll trade a little thicker, a little
heavier for a decent keyboard, a bigger battery, and at least 32G of
memory in a “pro” laptop, thank you very much.)

Not sure what I’ll do, but I guess I’m taking 17.04 on the road next week.